**Mineralization of Lipid A-Phosphates in Three- and Two-Dimensional Colloidal Dispersions**

Henrich H. Paradies, Peter Quitschau, Hendrik Reichelt, Chester A. Faunce and Kurt Zimmermann

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/48493

### **1. Introduction**

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Crystal growth and crystal nucleation has attracted interest for centuries and goes back to Johannes Kepler [1] in 1611. Though progress in the understanding of crystal nucleation and crystal growth were theoretically developed, exact quantitative prediction of the nucleation rates and their kinetics still remains unresolved [2]. As early in 1959, the protocol of preparation of virus crystals and their physical analysis revealed an interparticle spacing of 250 nm [3, 4]. The crystal growth from microcrystalline material to single crystals of viruses marked another event for crystal nucleation. It was concluded for this *Tipula* iridescent virus that the hydrated virus particles in the crystal are not in contact but are separated by large distances of water (~ 50 nm) showing soft modes in the direction of a lattice site and the lattice displacements at a given time is caused by a longitudinal phonon with a wave vector at the zone boundary [5, 6]. These crystals are probably held together by long-range forces operating at a distance comparable with the size of the particles themselves. This is very similar to the recently discovered *autovaccines* obtained from non-pathogenic *E. coli* as liquid colloidal and solid nanocrystals [7-11]. The former virus crystals as well as the discussed liquid *autovaccine* crystals seem to present the well-established instance of a unique ordering of iso-dimensional colloidal particles in three dimensions in solutions and in the solid state. This holds also for the prediction of polymorphic crystal forms like liquid crystals, especially for complex crystalline solid forms originating from colloidal dispersions of e.g. chiral Lipid A-phosphates [12], cationic lipids [13-17], anionic surfactants [18], diblock copolymers [19], or surfactant-water complexes [20]. Crystallization, phase transitions and crystal growth remain a central topic of condensed matter physics. A detailed understanding of the controlled formation of crystalline materials is of great importance for

© 2012 Paradies et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2012 Paradies et al., licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

numerous applications, especially for colloidal particles [21-23], biomimetic approaches to mineralization [24], curved crystalline shapes that emerged from mixtures of barium or strontium carbonates and silica in alkaline media [25], and usually from devices derived from self-assembly of colloidal materials [26, 27].
